I feel like I missed this part of internet school.

  • Andy@lemmy.world
    561·
    2 years ago

    An RSS feed is a publication that you can subscribe to without needing to give any personal information, such as your email address.

    Website would publish their blog entries to an RSS feed so you didn’t need to keep going to their website, or give your email address to get it sent to you that way.

    RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

        • Spiracle@kbin.social
          7·
          2 years ago

          Is there a big difference between paid and free readers? It seems weird for them to only list readers with monthly cost (+a browser).

          • towerful@programming.dev
            4·
            2 years ago

            A “raw” RSS feeder will fetch the RSS entries and display them for you.

            I presume paid features are meta around the RSS feeds.
            So you could add your own notes to the items.
            You could have groups/categories of items beyond just grouping by their source.
            The service might fetch/cache them automatically, whereas a free one might not have an “always on” type functionality and might miss posts if it’s not pulling ever month or whatever (same, with errors).
            On top of that, if another user on the service is subscribed to an RSS feed, you might be able to access the feeds history (beyond the timescale/history the feed keeps published).
            The service might be able to highlight and alert you to updated posts, showing the difference between the revisions.
            The service might also be able to recommend similar RSS feeds based on other users interests, aiding in discovery.
            And all of this would by automatically synchronised between devices.

        • 10EXP@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Thought I’d drop my Reader recommendations (all free of cost and FOSS):

          • iOS/iPadOS and MacOS: NetNewsWire - App Store, GitHub
          • Android: ReadYou - F-Droid, GitHub
          • Linux: NewsFlash - Flathub, GitLab
          • Windows (cross-platform): GitHub I’m not listing links for all 6-ish platforms of just this one individually just go here.

          The aforementioned are readers which can either read feeds saved in them locally, or on a supported service. If you wish to self-host a feed aggregator (so you can sync your read articles etc across platforms), I recommend FreshRSS. NetNewsWire can sync this stuff over iCloud.

  • gitstash@lemmy.world
    18·
    2 years ago

    As mentioned, RSS is used by RSS readers to keep tabs on constantly updating content.

    Typically this would be something like: today’s sports/business stories, every single weather watch issued by the National Weather Service, or the last 10 blog posts on Daring Fireball.

    Like most XML-based formats from the early 2000’s, it’s complex, excessively verbose, and hard to read as a human (hello CDATA) but it’s good enough for computers.

    What killed it was Google killing off the most popular reader (Google Reader). They did this mostly because people wouldn’t go to the destination websites… which is bad for their pagview metrics.

    Ultimately Facebook came along and put everything behind their wall, where no RSS feeds are available.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 years ago

    I’ll add the important bit, that it’s this icon:

    If you see this icon, click it. If you have a program/app that can read the feed, it will open and you’ll see what it does.

    Even Lemmy communities have their own RSS feeds, tho it’s limited to last 10 or 50? Idk, posts.

  • notannpc@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 years ago

    Since others answered already I’ll just add that if you’re on iOS or macOS I highly recommend https://netnewswire.com/ for an RSS reader. It’s a fantastic, free and open source app. It doesn’t require an account or third party server to use for your feeds.

    • wrath-sedan@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      Seconded! Amazing app. I noted in my own comment you might have to go somewhere else for discovery since there’s no in-app search, but as a reader it’s near perfect.

  • wrath-sedan@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been loving RSS for awhile now not only because it’s private but because it seems to be unpaywalled as well? Maybe someone can answer this, but how is it I can subscribe to the NYT RSS feed and can get completely free articles to my reader?

    PS shoutout to NetNewsWire on iOS which is open source and the developer seems like a great guy. It’s not great for discovery as you have to paste in the web url manually, but if you already know what you want to read it’s a great RSS reader app.